The cult of Aesop

Do you think the luxury soap-maker Aesop would have been valued at £2 billion pre-pandemic? I don’t. Sure, the botanical Aussie cosmetics brand, famously seen in the prettiest restaurants and lining the bathrooms of the fashionable, has been valuable for some time, but ‘hands, face, space’ propelled its growing stardom into a multi-billion pound lather. Today, having one of the cult bottles on the basin is as ubiquitous a status symbol as driving a 4×4 around Chipping Norton. 

L’Oréal announced this month that it has signed an agreement with Natura &Co, the brand’s owners, to acquire Aesop in a deal worth $2.5 billion USD (around £2 billion). In 2018, Aesop had net sales revenue of £214 million, and today it has more than 200 shops across 29 countries: not a bad trajectory for a product that started out being sold from a single suburban hair salon in Melbourne, Australia, in 1987. Apparently the move will help L’Oréal find firmer footing in China, which strikes me as rather ironic.